The Naked Lunch

 

William S. Burroughs The Naked Lunch (1959)
This was probably the third or fourth Burroughs I read, back in the first flourish of youth when I was reading everything I could find by the man. I therefore suspect I may not have read it since the early eighties, which would at least explain the deficit between what I've read just now and what I vaguely remember.

I'm sure you all know what Naked Lunch does and I don't see much point going over it yet again; but for what it may be worth, it's essentially a written equivalent to one of those Heironymous Bosch paintings commenting on the questionable state of his society by showing a thousand tiny figures with foreign objects projecting painfully from their bumholes. I'd somehow forgotten that it slightly predates Burroughs' use of cut-ups, so although we have random narrative swerves and streams of consciousness implied by Céline's three little dots, it's muted compared to the impersonal onslaught of undifferentiated meaning we find in subsequent books. Mostly we have routines and dialogue, essentially similar to what we read in Junky and Queer but without the linearity.

Much to my surprise, and regardless of whatever I thought first time round, Naked Lunch is a transitional novel wherein the author is still very much finding his feet; and it feels as though those feet were mostly trudging. Of course, it throws up plenty of interesting ideas, but nothing which wasn't better expressed to greater dramatic effect in the novels which followed, most of which additionally benefit from a greater variety of narrative techniques. While Naked Lunch is arguably important, its reputation refers mostly to it having been unlike anything published at the time. This particular edition commemorates this by reproducing three or four months worth of sniffy editorials and related correspondence from the Times Literary Supplement on the subject of how Naked Lunch was either disgraceful or the bestest best thing ever. Both Michael Moorcock and Anthony Burgess chip in for the defense but no conclusion is reached, and the strangest realisation is how closely this lengthy exchange - beginning in November, 1963 - resembles the incoherent slanging matches seen on Twitter whenever someone points out that women don't usually have cocks. The language may be elevated and the sentences constructed as though by Renaissance architects according to the golden section, but the arguments still amount to burrows is shit LOL #cantfuckinwrite followed by a string of those horrible crying with laughter emoticons, which I feel sort of proves Billy's point about one or two things.

1985

Anthony Burgess 1985 (1978)
Hanging out on social media as I often do, there have been a couple of occasions of right-wing shitheads proclaiming that Orwell's 1984 was a warning against the evils of socialism, an observation made with some frequency during Donald Trump's first year in the hot seat, back when his Proud Boys were regularly firing up those tiki torches in protest against political correctness and the like; and it was an observation usually made within minutes of someone else pointing out that Adolf Hitler was a socialist, so it was the rest of us who were the real Nazis. Naturally, having read both Orwell's 1984 and his collected essays, I rolled my eyes.

Anyway, while the idea of socialism being the same as national socialism is obviously bollocks - the ethnic or cultural exclusivity of nationalism being in direct contradiction of socialist ideals, it unfortunately turns out the Trumpanzees were sort of right about 1984, albeit possibly for the wrong reasons; and I'm not sure how I missed it. Orwell, like Burgess - and me too, quite frankly - considered himself a socialist who despaired at the more didactic tendencies of the left, those prioritising ideology over people and whose ruthless zealotry had ultimately led to the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union. So while 1984 describes an oppressive totalitarian state, it's a satire quite clearly extrapolated from everything which kept Orwell awake at night back in 1948.

Burgess' response is 1985, a book divided into two complementary parts. The first comprises essays analysing Orwell's novel in comparison with how well socialism has been coping here in the real world. Burgess concludes that 1984 was not only lousy in a predictive sense - as the majority of science-fiction tends to be - but wasn't even particularly great as satire, being riddled with contradictions and ideas which seem hysterical in relation to that which inspired them. His point is that 1984 never happened, and couldn't happen, and his argument, as set out in the first half of this book, is convincing, illuminating, and extraordinarily perceptive - possibly one of the most insightful summaries of the politics of the last century that I've read.

Unfortunately, the second part of the argument employs a fictional narrative to make its point, whatever the hell that might be. It seems to be Burgess rewriting 1984 as he believes it should have been done, but as a satire based on his own era, specifically the late seventies. The elements of parody and exaggeration are either well done, or at least make sense in the context of what 1985 is trying to do, but being as the subject is socialism pushed to a ludicrous ideological extreme by the sort of wankers who presently hang around on Twitter policing the perpetrators of wrongthink, it comes across like a fucking Two Ronnies sketch about all those unions going on strike over the spoons in the staff canteen, coupled with the usual scaremongering about Islam. Were someone to commission Richard Littlejohn to write a satirical summary of left-wing politics in Britain in the seventies, I don't actually know if it would be much different aside from the quality of the writing. 1985 is not entirely without worth, and the overeducated street gangs are sort of amusing, somewhat harking back to A Clockwork Orange, even if the impression they leave seems to rest upon the idea that everything would be better if we all just made the effort to listen to Beethoven and read a bit more Shakespeare.

Having myself been in a labour union for two decades, and having come to conclude that said labour union didn't always have the best interests of its membership at heart, I see where Burgess is coming from because no system is immune to corruption from nest-feathering infiltrators; but ramping up the satire to the point at which it begins to resemble a Franklin cartoon in The Sun doesn't seem like a great solution; unless it's actually a parody of 1984 which targets what Burgess sees as Orwell's essentially conservative rhetoric, although even in such a case, it's still barely readable. So it's a game of two halves, Brian, one of them wonderful - perhaps even essential - and the other, a waste of everyone's time and coincidentally representative of exactly the sort of hyperbole which helped get Thatcher into power.

Unfortunately, even though everything Burgess says regarding 1984 is spot on, Orwell nevertheless wrote the significantly better book.

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess A Clockwork Orange (1962)
Despite potential arguments against, I can't help but think of A Clockwork Orange as part of a thematic trilogy also including Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's 1984. All three deal with authoritarian societies, and each has made its own contribution to the collective imagination - everything from Big Brother to the cover of the first Angelic Upstarts album; also, both 1984 and A Clockwork Orange have rightly come to be regarded as literature, and having escaped the science-fiction ghetto can be discussed as such in polite company without too much giggling and pointing.

The most popularly known facts of A Clockwork Orange are probably that Stanley Kubrick's filmed version was banned - except that actually it wasn't - and that it isn't quite written in English. Some editions have included glossaries of Nadsat as an appendix - Nadsat being the pseudo-Russian argot with which Alex, our humble narrator, peppers his speech; but I must admit I never saw the necessity. The novel is written in such a way as to make the meaning of most of its unfamiliar terms as clear as you're likely to need through context and repetition. Written shortly after the invention of the teenager as something distinct from the adult with its own habits, customs, and language, A Clockwork Orange takes a wild, speculative, and possibly alarmist leap in predicting the future of the generation gap that opened up across the western nations immediately following the second world war, although of course the point of the book is not so much about teenage rebellion as how a society deals with its own disruptive element. The authorities of this world, much like those of our own, subscribe to the idea that individuals can be compelled towards that which they deem good, educating through drugs, propaganda and conditioning in the absence of any more legitimate inducement to obey the laws of a hypocritical system.

Half a century later this novel is as relevant as it ever was, and has lost none of its power thanks, in part, to the strength of Burgess's vision - a future society which is both immediately recognisable and nevertheless timeless though being referentially divorced from any single obvious era or source of inspiration. I'm inclined to wonder if Nadsat was chosen simply as something randomly plucked from the direction opposite to American culture of the fifties and sixties, but then it doesn't really matter where it came from.

I frequently encounter discussion of the death penalty as it presently stands in thirty-two American states, and it seems to me that the best argument for abolition makes no reference to either the sentenced offender, any general consensus of justice, or those offended against, but instead concentrates on what the existence of a death penalty says about the rest of us and our society as a whole. It is a similar argument, I would say, to that which Burgess sets forth in this novel, and with so many of the marginally privileged presently clambering over each other to demonise one minority or another - ethnic, economic or otherwise - purely because that's what it takes to get some people into the voting booth, A Clockwork Orange remains at least as relevant as it has ever been; almost certainly one of the greatest science-fiction novels of all time.

Deus Irae

Philip K. Dick & Roger Zelazny Deus Irae (1975)
I'm unfamiliar with Roger Zelazny, although Deus Irae features a few passages written in a style quite unlike that of Dick, so I assume those would be his, despite which this collaboration feels very much like the work of the author of VALIS. In fact, it could almost be read as a run-up to that novel without too much shoehornery.

Deus Irae follows the pilgrimage of Tibor McMasters as he travels across the wasteland of a post-apocalypse Earth in search of Carlton Lufteufel, the author of the aforementioned apocalypse who is now considered an avatar of the God of Wrath. McMaster's is to paint the living image of the Deus Irae for his church, the Servants of Wrath; in other words, he seeks to establish the existence of God, or at least of this particular manifestation - essentially the mad demiurge who casts a shadow of illusion upon the world in Dick's roughly Gnostic understanding of reality, amounting to the same malign presence he experienced gazing down from the clouds for an entire week back in the sixties - a visionary interlude to which this novel refers in several places.

McMasters is followed by Pete Sands, a more orthodox Christian who disputes that Carlton Lufteufel can truly be regarded as a God and who views the pilgrimage with great uncertainty. Pete Sands is a fairly transparent author stand-in - Dick rather than Zelazny in this case - but it might be argued that the two of them, McMasters and Sands, share a relationship not unlike that of Horselover Fat and Dick himself in the later VALIS, two aspects of the same divided personality. Both seek God by different means, and it is Sands who relates the experience of the face of a wrathful creator seen gazing down from the sky. Furthermore, McMasters encounters a worm by the Biblical meaning of the term, a creature which anoints him with a slime that grants understanding of the language of the animals roaming the wasteland. It's difficult to miss the parallel with the Edenic serpent which grants knowledge, or how immediately following this incident, Pete Sands is similarly able to communicate with the beasts he encounters. Of course, the reason for this, as given in numerous summaries spread all across the internet, is that with this being a radioactive wasteland, these are mutant creatures which have developed sentience and the ability to speak; but if this explanation appears in the text, then I'm afraid I failed to spot it, and the encounters read more like visionary religious experiences; and they're actually more interesting as such.

This, for me, is true of the novel as a whole, and particularly in terms of whether or not the guy who blew up the world can be regarded as a God in any meaningful sense: read as post-apocalyptic science-fiction with the usual array of mutants, bunkers, and robots that have turned a bit wonky in the absence of programming, it's great, but you're really missing out on the good stuff, just as A Clockwork Orange isn't really about how snazzy it is to be a futuristic teenager. Read as one of Dick's convoluted religious allegories, I'd say it might even beat VALIS, aside from my not having read the later novel in a while.